Living Water

We sent this picture to one of our well drillers in India.  The subject line read:  ”I think we have  a solution!”

His one-line response: “Does it work with dirty water?”

I once told another of our India directors that I would love to visit his country but I don’t know the dances.  (In case you’ve never seen a Bollywood movie, their characters break out into elaborate dance many times in a film, changing clothes many times per dance).

A short, dark skinned man with a wide smile, he replied, “I’ll teach you!”

But right now we’re not laughing.  Some of our guys were recently attacked.  If you’re not already following the story, check it out here as it unfolds.  Our Indian brothers make us laugh, and they make us cry with their caring, loving, kingdom response to adversity.  This quarter we’ll be proud to channel OneDollarWater funds to support their work in India. 

Be blessed, knowing you’re reaching out to the Church in India, a place where thousands of minority-groups of Jesus-followers meet in homes to conspire to love God and neighbor the Jesus way.  And they do it without big churches buildings, audio-visual equipment, youth centers, Sunday child-care, television-evangelists, summercamp, vbs, paid church staff, parking lots or teeny tiny plastic grape juice cups. 

Kinda like in the Bible…but they at least need water to drink.  And not the dehydrated kind.

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Good Friday to Easter Sunday. I wonder if I would have remained faithful. We might give ourselves too much credit since we know the end of the story. Those grim days from Good Friday to Resurrection Sunday remind us to be faithful—no matter what.

Remaining faithful to the thirsty means sustained commitment, like yours. It means follow-up, repair, education—at our drill sites, and at wells others have drilled and forgotten about. For the coming months we’ll be celebrating well rehabilitations in India that $1 a day givers have made possible, like this one in Kondalor, Chhatishghar.

Drilled by the government 10 years ago, this well worked for 9 ½ years! It serves 1,000 people! But this tribal region is now neglected by the government. For 6 months prior to this rehab the well didn’t work. People were suffering. Then you repaired it—new life! In Jesus’ name. Because people set aside a buck a day.

The well looks tattered and spent. But it was touched by the hands and feet of Jesus. Now it’s reaching down deep (174 feet) and giving life. Whether on the cross from Good Friday to Easter Sunday or in the eyes of the kids of Kondalor, wherever we see Jesus we’re reminded—remain faithful.

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OneDollarWater Friends,

It’s been quite a year. Your dollar a day has meant life for thousands. Thank you for your sustained commitment.

ODW highlights over the past year include:

• Following someone home from a hospital in India to drill a well that would heal the whole village.

• An old man from Jharudela, India shouting, “You gave us life and there is no diarrhea, no water born disease and no child death!  We consider this the greatest gift of our lives!”

• Reaching out to war refugees in Sierra Leone, the world’s most underdeveloped country and birthplace of the transatlantic slave trade, with clean drinking water.

• While Haiti was being wrecked by hurricanes, we got to reach out to the people of Carfoua Jesus with clean water–and children gathered to sing “Jesus Loves Me” in French while our crew worked.

There have been many more stories like these, but best of all-your support has been something we can count on. We plan on it because your commitment is sustained-and so is ours.

Over the years we have been stunned by the number of broken-down wells we encounter. Many are drilled by the biggest development organizations in the world, but the village is left with no one to call when they break down. Some are $15,000 or $20,000 wells.

Rehabilitating these wells is the most cost effective water intervention in the world.

Fixing these wells is also a great opportunity to share the gospel and reflect God’s live with real, tangible care. It doesn’t matter to us that they’re “other people’s” wells. All the money in the world can’t take the place of sustained presence, which is what LWI is about. That’s sustainability.

In 2009 LWI aims to rehabilitate more than 1,000 broken wells. This year we want to dedicate your sustained commitment to our commitment to sustained development!

Subscribe to the blog. We’ll be posting stories and thoughts a couple times a month so you can see where your dollar goes.

OneDollarWater–sustained giving for sustainable clean water. Come back and watch it happen!

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The Junior Optimists Club at Jackson Middle School in San Antonio, Texas was concerned about kids in refugee camps around Gulu, Uganda. These kids cannot go home to their villages because they don’t have clean drinking water there.

They saw the ONEDOLLARWATER.COM website and thought it was pretty cool. There was one obstacle: they’re a bunch of 6th, 7th and 8th graders with no jobs and no credit cards.

But they didn’t let that stop them. They went to work selling t-shirts, bracelets, they held a “water walk” at their school, they had a fund-raising dinner at a local restaurant. They collected, they asked, they gave and they inspired others to give. Next thing they knew they had $15,000 together to sponsor a well in Uganda.

Today, their teacher Miss Riggs, is in Uganda visiting that well and the people it serves.

Hats off to the kids at Jackson Middle School. If they can ask enough of their friends to provide $15,000 worth of hope and life to war refugees in Uganda, we can ask ours to consider giving $1 a day!

Hooray for the Junior Optimists!

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(Right) U.S. war heroes raising the flag on the island of Iwo Jima. Some of WWII’s fiercest fighting took place here. Thousands of Japanese soldiers hid in underground tunnels after the invasion, coming out only at night to prowl for food. Of the more than 21,000 Japanese soldiers on the island 20,703 died in battle or committed suicide. The Allied forces lost 27,909 soldiers in the battle–we salute every one of you. The raising of the flag of Iwo Jima is the most reproduced photograph in the history of the world.

(Left) Aweil, capitol city of North Bahr al Ghazal in Southern Sudan, another war zone. In a world where celebrities wear Save Darfur t-shirts and call incessantly for someone to save this battle-weary Sudanese region, a bunch of Christians from Living Water International jump in an airplane, go to this war-torn country and hit the ground to start healing people hand-in hand with Sudanese brothers.

If you’d like to support these heroes, ask someone to sing up for One Dollar Water right now and we’ll sponsor some of their work! Hats off to our heroes!

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“Would you give a million dollars to the poor?” a Sunday school teacher asked her students.

“Yes!” the children shouted in unanimous unison.

“Would you give a thousand dollars to the poor?”

“Yes!”

“Would you give a one dollar to the poor?”

The room fell silent. “What’s the difference?” the teacher asked.

One honest student offered an answer: “The difference is I have one dollar!”

It’s estimated that $10 billion a year would solve the world water crisis. It sounds like a lot, but Americans spend $18 billion a year on make up! It’s a question of allocation. Most my friends have a dollar.

To all of you who took the challenge to allocate $1 a day for clean water—cheers!

You da real thang.

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Wasn’t that cool how Dr. Martin Luther King had a dream?

You know who else had a dream? Slave-traders!

Man, they thought BIG! They weren’t afraid to leave their comfort zones.

I was just on the shores of Freetown, Sierra Leone, where the slave trade began. I looked out over the Atlantic, imagining those ships coming in from Europe and America, the Christian world…

I was struck by the enormity of their project. Enslaving 10 million people is a lot of work! All this before diesel-powered ships and trucks.

I wondered if WE could dream of something so big.

All they had on their side was GREED, rigth? We have LOVE on ours, don’t we?

Can we dream of solving the world water crisis? They say it would take $10 billion additional dollars a year to bring water to half of the world’s population in need.

This year Americans will spend $18 billion on make up. $450 billion on Christmas. Why not dream? Do we love people and justice as much as those traders loved cotton and money?

If one in 10 Americans signed up to give $1 a day here, water could be supplied to half a billion people with water.

And have $800,000,000 left over.

(For make up?)

It starts with signing up. Or asking someone else to sign up.

Or is that out of our comfort zone?

Dream.

Love.

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We just posted about slavery, vision, Sierra Leone and the birth of the Atlantic Slave Trade.

Recent years didn’t look much better for lots of people in Sierra Leone. War has torn the country up. Same for their neighbors. We found ourselves in a refugee camp in the ironically named Kissitown. It had become home to 60,000 Sierra Leonean and Liberian war refugees. The area where we were, Section F, was home to 2,000 refugees.

With no water.

Then we experienced liberation! A bunch of us got in the habit of liberating ourselves of $1 a day.

We freed ourselves of that dollar so our friends at Kissitown UN Refugee Camp could be free of water worries!

We’re free of that dollar! Free to help! Free to love! Free to give life! Free to give water!

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